Memory Quota

The city woke in measured increments, as if someone had divided dawn into quotas and doled it out through vents and cables. Alya counted these increments the way other people counted breaths. There was a rhythm to everything—the clink of the dispensers, the hush of the corridors between the administration blocks, the low mechanical hymn of filaments behind the Ministry's glass. On mornings like this she moved with the precision of a clerk who had been trained to fit her life into the margins of a ledger no one ever wrote down aloud: arrive, log, calibrate, distribute, close. Her palms smelled faintly of ozone and the chemical polish the Bureau used on the allocation trays.

Her apartment was a narrow rectangle that looked out over stacked roofs; the view was a grid of flat planes and the occasional tilted antenna that the city allowed as marks of private defiance. She had learned to live in small measured pleasures—an extra cup of filtered coffee on Thursdays, a window kept open for ten minutes when the distribution had ended, a photograph folded into a slit of cardboard that showed a woman she had known once, years ago, before the Ministry’s programs had rearranged the shape of days. The photograph had been allowed a single place in her world because the paper showed no encoded impressions and therefore posed no risk.

At six, the building's annunciator chimed the same low bell everyone had grown to trust. On the street, service droids released their occupants at the portals and the population drifted toward the Ministry in their appointed tranches. People did not rush here; there was no rush in a city whose velocity had been calibrated for stability. The goal, the pamphlets always said, was to preserve the public mind from the storms that unregulated recollection could stir. The Ministry of Equilibrium had been explicit: unmanaged memory breeds unrest, unrest breeds violence, violence breeds ruin. The message came with diagrams—curves that peaked and flattened when measures were applied—and a smiling commissioner in a uniform so pressed it seemed the fabric itself had been disciplined into conformity.

Alya’s station was on the fourth floor of the Bureau for Distribution. It was one room carved out of bureaucratic appetite: banks of consoles, allocation trays humming beneath glass covers, a wall of small lights that tracked the flow of distributed content across the city. Each morning she logged into her terminal, confirmed the day’s baseline vector, verified the ledger of personal quotas assigned to neighborhoods, and signed off on the minor adjustments that reconciled hundreds of small lives into a single pattern. It was precise work that left little room for wonder.